Palm Drivers Update

Palm Drivers

Company: Palm

Description: Jeff Hawkins started Palm Computing, Inc. in 1992. Its initial design was a personal digital assistant called Zoomer. These were produced by Casio and distributed by Tandy. Palm mainly contributed the PIM software used in the Zoomer PDA. Geoworks provided the platform for the PDA. This first design was not received well in the market. Palm also sold programs for synchronizing HP products. It also developed handwriting recognition software for the MessagePad device called Graffiti.

U.S. Robotics Corp. bought Palm in 1995. U.S. Robotics was later bought by 3Com. 3Com absorbed Palm and made it into a subsidiary. Hawkins and the other members of his main team, Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, left the company in 1998. The three started another company called Handspring.

Palm operated as a separate company under 3Com. It was registered in the stock market in March 1, 2000. The full name of the company was used in the ticker.

A subsidiary named PalmSource was started in 2002 to focus on developing the Palm OS. It was later turned into another company.

PalmOne, Inc. was started in August 2003. It contained the original hardware manufacturing assets of Palm and the company Handspring. The symbol used in trading was PLMO. A holding company owns the Palm brand. PalmOne later owned full rights to the Palm brand by buying PalmSource’s stake. PalmOne changed its name back to Palm, Inc. and was traded again under the same name. PalmSource was bought by ACCESS in 2005.

A partnership with Verizon Wireless and Microsoft resulted in the Palm Treo 700w. It was the first in the Treo line of smart phones that used Windows Mobile.

Palm purchased the programming script for the Palm OS Garnet from ACESS in 2006. This allowed it to produce both the software and the hardware of Palm PDAs.

A 25% stake in the company was bought by Elevation Partners in 2007. This came in the midst of gossip about a supposed takeover.

Palm has released a number of PDA models. Most are equipped with the company developed PalmOS. Others were released with the Windows Mobile platform. Some equipped with WiFi. The earlier models are already discontinued. The latest, Palm Treo Pro uses Windows Mobile and is equipped with the technologies CDMA, WiFi and GSM.

The company also developed other software aside from the Palm OS for PDAs. A PIM called Palm Desktop was created for organizing contacts, calendar appointments, tasks and notes. It can be used with a PDA using Palm OS. The program runs on both Windows and Mac OS or Mac OS X.